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Singing Hymns in the Church of Baseball
We didn’t know it at the time, but Debbie and I were watching Joe Musgrove’s final start of not just the postseason, but his final time taking the mound until (most likely) 2026. It’s a blow to the bullpen — especially considering Musgrove had been carrying a 2.15 ERA in his 9 starts since coming off the IL in August — and a knock to his teammates and fans alike. Joe is a fan favorite, and lethal on the mound, but now the ethereal refrain around him will be not Java Joe, but Tommy John.
Such is the life of a baseball player, and such are the vagaries of the sport itself. Lucky for us, Joe is a fighter and it would not shock me to see him make a surprise appearance (maybe, we can pray) sometime late next year. The average recovery time from TJ is between one year and eighteen months, but if you’re a Padres fan you know Joe is going to do everything in his power to return as swiftly as possible. For now, all we can do is raise a cuppa to the dynamo that is Java Joe.
Speaking of vagaries and baseball — it’s so like the Padres to have had the bases loaded and score zero runs, but then (an inning later) have two outs and put up a five-spot. The man who got the ball rolling, and who laced a homer towards the Western Metal Supply building, was none other than the hero of the previous night: Kyle Higashioka. By the time Jackson Merrill had racked up a triple, Petco Park was an acoustic maelstrom and a riot of yellow towels. At one point the upper deck visibly shook as fans were out of their seats, jumping like billy-goats on epinephrine — I should know, I was part of the shaking.
This communal power to shake and move mountains (or at least a ballpark) is one of my favorite things about being at a baseball game. A sporting event, much like a concert, is the closest most people get to a religious experience anymore. To stand with thousands of other believers — or in our case 47,705, a new record that topped even the night before — is to bear witness. You were there, you felt the earth move, and you became a believer in the majesty of it all. A choir of 47,000 sang the hymns of “God Bless America”, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, and “All The Small Things” — the last by Blink-182, arguably the greatest band to ever hail from San Diego. Sports fills a need in all of us, and there is a reason we are called the Friar Faithful.
One of the recurring themes of this series is the power of friendship — in a real, tangible way this extends to even a seat neighbor, or a guy you accidentally bump into in the crowd. During the game, as I was wandering around the concourses as I tend to do, a fellow Friar Faithful bumped into me; twas harmless and no beer was spilled. I looked at him and said: “Hey, it’s all good. We’re all family here!” He laughed, agreed, and we fist-pumped; and that was it. I never saw him again, but I didn’t need to. He was family, he understood.
There are two types of family in the world: your flesh-and-blood relatives, and the friends you make along the way. “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel,” wrote Carl Jung, “if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.” You don’t always know where you are, or where you’re going, but odds are there are friends somewhere about — sometimes known, oftentimes unknown.
This found family, as these friends are called, don’t always appear when or how you expect. Oftentimes you’re not even looking for them. Debbie, the instigator of this whole trip, is one of those; as is Annie, who I’ll talk about more in the next dispatch. Deb and I met by chance outside of T-Mobile Park in September 2022. Debbie was accompanying Jeneane Lesko, a former lefty pitcher for the Grand Rapids Chicks back in the early ‘50s, who was being honored with other women baseball pioneers during the game. We met outside of a restaurant and decided, being Padres fans in enemy territory, to become Twitter friends. Two years later and now Deb and I are chasing the San Diego Padres around California.
Towards the end of the game, I was chatting with one of the upper deck ushers. He was, by far, one of the friendliest and most conversational ushers I’ve met. In my experience game ushers are either stone-faced and rule-obsessed or gregarious and easy-going — you can guess which kind of usher my guy was.
As we stood looking down over the field I asked him one of those weird questions I tend to ask people: “Are you living the dream?”
For my part, I was buzzing and having an unreasonably good time in America’s Finest City — so how could he not be? Here he was, standing high-above the most beautiful ballpark in the nation; his chosen team was in the playoffs and winning; it was a glorious evening and the sun was setting; he was surrounded by 47,000 fellow fans all cheering, and jumping, and singing. He had to be living the dream right?
He considered my question — which, I’ll be fair, was one of those questions you ask expecting to know the answer; it was supposed to be call-and-response — and he gave me the most unexpected, but the most genuine reply. It was the reply of a man who had grown up in San Diego, who remembered the long, hard, lean years of a franchise that had nothing to root for. He no doubt remembered how Ray Kroc — yes, that Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s founder — had bought the team for $12 million in 1974 and single-handedly saved the Padres from moving to Washington D.C. His look made me think the Padres had given him hypertension.
"I'll be living the dream when I'm ushering the parade,” he replied. The World Series Parade. The only parade that matters to a baseball team.
As the game ground into the final inning, Robert Suarez emerged from the bullpen to close it. Was I as worried as I had been the night before? No, but not by much. As he ran out to “Bandoleros Song” by Don Omar and Tego Calderón, I kept thinking about what Manny Machado had shouted to him mere seconds after the famous triple play on September 24, the play that clinched the Padres spot in the postseason. It ran like a refrain in my head: “We’ve got you, baby! We’ve got you!” If the Padres infield had Suarez — aka Bobby Bullets — if they believed in and supported him, then dammit so could I.
With two outs, Atlanta Braves pinch-hitter Travis d’Arnaud hit a pop-up on Suarez’s first pitch. It was a ball that sailed so temptingly high along the first base line that both Higgy and 1B Donovan Solano went for it. After a near collision, in which both players went down, Higgy stood-up to reveal the ball firmly in his glove. The game was over, the Padres had won 5-4 and were now NLDS-bound.
The boys did have Bobby Bullets and our faith had been rewarded.
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This article was so fresh and exciting it felt as though I was with you & Deb and 74,000 others!